


a little help from a friend

by hydrospanners



Series: renegade [35]
Category: Star Wars Legends: The Old Republic (Video Game)
Genre: And there was only one sleeping bag!, Friendship, Gen, Platonic Cuddling, Platonic Female/Male Relationships, Platonic Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-15
Updated: 2020-03-15
Packaged: 2021-02-28 19:20:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,848
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23162404
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hydrospanners/pseuds/hydrospanners
Summary: the one where theron must choose between death or sharing body heat with his friend/nemesis. theron will wonder what he did to deserve this punishment. emotions will be tossed back and forth like a hot potato no one wants. friendships will be affirmed. nipples will be flicked. everyone will (probably) make it out alive.
Relationships: Female Jedi Knight | Hero of Tython & Theron Shan
Series: renegade [35]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/987951
Comments: 6
Kudos: 11





	a little help from a friend

“This,” Theron says, shimmying out of his soaked trousers, “is your fault.”

Rea’s top hits him in the face. “You’re welcome for your life.”

“My life wouldn’t have even been in danger if you hadn’t--”

“You have to take those off.”

Theron, holding open the cover of the sleeping bag to step in, blinks at her. He only has one thing left to take off.

“No,” he says.

“You can’t warm up in wet fucking clothes, Theron. Don’t they teach you anything in SIS?” She gives him a look that tells him just how much she thinks of SIS training before throwing her wet bra in his face. Being that it’s at least as saturated with her blood as melted snow, it’s slightly warmer than her top was.

“I’m not doing it, Rea.”

“Stop being a little bitch and get naked with me.”

She strips out of her underwear and this time, he catches it before it slaps him across the face. “You’re a starsdamned menace,” he says. “Don’t look.”

She rolls her eyes. “Like you’ve got anything I want to see.”

Still, she keeps her eyes on the sleeping bag as she peels it open and slips inside. Theron keeps his eyes on literally anything else. Objectively attractive though she might be—and he’s gone through the personal messages of enough Alliance personnel to know she is—the idea of looking at her naked body turns his stomach. It would be like… looking at Satele. Like looking at a sister, he supposes, if he had one.

It just feels wrong.

“Will you get in the fucking bag already? I promise I’m not gonna look at your shriveled dick. And if I see it by accident, I promise not to laugh. It’s cold. It’s not your fault.”

“I’m not—“ Theron stops himself. She’s just trying to provoke him and he’s not going to let her. After the shit she’s put him through today, he refuses to give her the pleasure of seeing him annoyed. “Scooch over,” he grumbles, and dives into the bag next to her.

It is not, at first, very warm.

Rea’s skin is cold as ice and slick with half-frozen blood and sweat.

He forgot about blood loss.

This is the thing about Rea that makes her so completely unbearable. Every single time you get angry with her, it turns out she was just pissing you off to distract you from your own hopeless misery, and that she did it while she was bleeding out from a blaster wound you didn’t even know she had. It turns out you’re the one being a fucking toddler while she’s over there sucking up a life-threatening injury like a champ.

It’s hard to stay mad at her after that. Even if she is being an ass.

So Theron grits his teeth and does the most he can for her: he wraps her in his arms.

He’s petulantly satisfied when Rea goes rigid in his grip, clearly as uncomfortable with this arrangement as he is, no matter what she pretends. Blood loss or no blood loss, hypothermia or no hypothermia, this is just as fucking weird for her as it is for him.

He wonders sometimes if he should be more offended that Rea, a woman who would put the moves on a lamppost in the right lighting, is so totally uninterested in him. But mostly, he’s too busy being relieved. The idea of her being attracted to him is nearly as repellent as the idea of him being attracted to her.

It takes hardly a second for Rea to recover, to relax back into the bravado she wears like armor. Her tension releases and she snuggles into Theron’s embrace like they do this every day.

It doesn’t bother him as much as he expected.

He isn’t what you’d call an affectionate person. He can’t remember the last time he touched someone outside of trying to either save their life or take it. Or sex, but sex isn’t the same as _this_. Not the way Theron does it anyway.

He can’t remember the last time he touched someone for comfort. For closeness.

Rea wouldn’t mind it, he knows. She’s already touchy feely as hell with everyone else. She might not even give him shit for it. Terrible as she is, she seems to know which of his boundaries can be pushed and which can’t. She might spend twenty out of the twenty-four hours in a day giving him shit, but she almost never puts her hands on him if she doesn’t have to.

He’s halfway to considering the possibility of allowing himself the smallest sliver of affection from this, the unlikeliest of sources, when she opens her mouth and fucks it all up.

“Your nipples are like fucking knives.”

It’s one of the worst sentences he’s ever heard. And then, one of her ice-cold fingertips pokes at his frigid nipple and that is easily one of the worst things he’s ever felt, which altogether makes this possibly the worst day he’s ever had.

He hisses, and arches away from her as far as the sleeping bag they’re zipped into together will allow.

It’s not very far.

“Don’t touch my nipples,” he snaps.

“You ever heard of moisturizer?” Rea asks, totally ignoring him and flicking his nipple with her finger.

He would fight her if he wasn’t absolutely sure he’d lose, blaster burns and all.

“You might have a condition,” she goes on, blithely. “When we get back to base, I’m sending you to Doc. He can at least give you a cream.”

“I am _not_ letting your husband touch my nipples,” Theron says. “And I’m done talking about it. Keep your hands to yourself.”

He feels her shrug--she’s one to talk about sharp nipples, isn’t she?--and says, “Your loss. Most people don’t complain when I touch their nipples.”

“If you say the word nipple one more time, I _will_ kill you.”

“You can try.”

“We should’ve left you in carbonite,” he grumbles.

His words are answered with silence. It lingers between them, the moment drawing out for endless seconds, growing heavier with every quiet breath, until finally Rea sighs. Until she whispers into the space between them, so quiet he almost doesn’t hear her say, “Probably.”

And _again_ he’s the asshole.

“Don’t be an idiot,” Theron tells her, a little gruffer than he means to be.

He’s not good at comfort at the best of times, and having to get naked with the woman he reluctantly considers his best friend to combat hypothermia in the galaxy’s tiniest sleeping bag is not what he’d call the best of times.

“I don’t know any other way to be,” Rea says. “Ask anyone.”

“Rea…”

“RonRon.”

“Don’t call me that.”

“SIS.”

“ _Rea_.”

“Doc is so much more fun to get hypothermia with,” she whines, trying to snuggle closer. Like there’s any closer she could get without unzipping him and climbing into his skin.

“Trust me, we would all be happier if he was here instead,” Theron agrees.

What wouldn’t he give to be toasty warm and fully clothed in the medwing on Odessen right now? It sounds like a dream.

“I almost brought him with us,” Rea says.

Theron raises a brow. “To do recon?”

“Stupid right? Best doctor in the galaxy and I’m gonna drag him away from the lab to the frozen asshole of space for what? So I can look at him?” She shivers, and Theron doesn’t think it’s from the cold. “I just keep thinking… What if he’s not there when I get back? What if he’s finally done waiting on me? Every single time I leave him behind, I get so scared about it I almost can’t breathe.”

It’s not something he thinks she would ever admit in the light of day. But there’s something about the night, something about the yawning, too-quiet darkness of it that has a way of drawing truths out of people.

Or maybe it was their shared brush with death.

“Have you, uh, talked to him? About it?” Theron can’t imagine a worse person to be giving relationship advice, but there’s no one else here. And he has a sneaking suspicion he’s the person she’d talk to even if there was. He has a sneaking suspicion Rea reluctantly considers him her best friend, too.

“Kind of? We always get distracted.”

If Theron is translating right, ‘get distracted’ is Rea-nese for ‘feelings are complicated so we fucked instead’.

“I’m not really an expert, Rea, but it seems like if he was going to run out of patience, he would’ve done it years ago.” If he was going to run out of patience, he probably never would’ve married Rea in the first place, but Theron doesn’t say that part.

“I know,” she sighs. “Archiban said the same thing. That’s what’s so fucking annoying!” She knocks her forehead against his shoulder in frustration. “He says he wants to be here. He says he wants to be with me. And I believe him! He wouldn’t lie about it, and it’s not like he’s one of those people who don’t really know what they want. But none of that stops me from freaking out every time I get on a transport without him. It’s totally irrational and I just… I have no fucking clue how to stop it.”

If Theron were a good best friend, he’d come up with something comforting to say. He’d tell her it’s going to be okay, tell her it’s normal, tell her it’ll all work out in the end.

Theron laughs at her instead.

“Hey,” Rea scowls, poking him hard in the gut. “I’m trying to talk about real shit like a normal fucking person, you asshole. Stop laughing.”

“I’m sorry,” Theron says, not meaning it. “It’s just… You’re mad cause you can’t control your feelings.”

“So?”

“It’s a pretty Jedi thing to be mad about.”

“You are such a _dick_.” Rea kicks him as well as she can with both their legs trapped together in the narrow taper of the bag, but it isn’t long before she’s laughing too.

It’s nice to be on the other side of this equation for once. To be the asshole for a good cause. He understands, a little, why she works so hard to put herself here.

“I hate you,” she grumbles at him, once their laughter fades.

“Sure.”

“You’re supposed to be nice to your friends, RonRon. Don’t they teach you anything at SIS?”

Unbidden, Theron’s mind drifts to Jonas. He shudders. “The SIS isn’t big on friendship,” he says.

“Well fuck the SIS,” Rea says. “You’re Alliance now.”

“Yeah,” Theron says. “I am.”

“You know what else you are?”

“A dick?” He guesses.

Theron can feel Rea’s smile against his shoulder. “Yeah, but you’re _my_ dick.”

“I wish you hadn’t said that.”

She just laughs, that stupid deep belly laugh she does when she isn’t laughing to cover something else. It feels good to hear it. Feels like a win.

He might not be so bad at this friendship stuff after all.


End file.
